Unlike most companies in Silicon Valley, Balsam Brands has raised no venture capital, has few recurring customers and sells the most seasonal of products: "'From a business standpoint,' says Harman, 41, 'this is a stupid, stupid idea.' But the Stanford M.B.A. has made it work. Launched in late 2006, Balsam is expected to reach $120 million in revenue this year. ... Fluorescently lit and cluttered with artificial trees, wreaths and flowers, Balsam's headquarters is upstairs from a bank in a two-story 1970s office building. Harman says his Valley friends have made fun of him for trying to sign a 14-year lease (the best he could do was 9). 'My friends will be on their fourth company in 20 years, and I still plan to be doing this,' he says. 'That's the weirdest thing in Silicon Valley.'"

Here's a case study in how to evaluate a subscription business: "Blue Apron formally stated their intention to become a public company in early June of 2017. The majority of the disclosures they provided at the time were standard top-down metrics (e.g., that aggregate sales in the U.S. grocery market were almost $800 billion, only 1.2% of these sales were made online, and the annual growth rate of online grocery sales are expected to be 8.5%). Their revenues grew by over 100% in 2016. The 30,000-foot-view looked pretty good. While Blue Apron had disclosed no information about customer retention in their filings, we created an extended version of the model from our journal article which could incorporate the eclectic customer disclosures they did provide, allowing us to generate the same managerial inferences as before. Our bottom-up view was markedly less optimistic than the top-down story that the company’s management team had painted. For instance, we estimated that around 70% of Blue Apron’s subscribers churn out after six months, the cost to acquire new customers (CAC) is rising rapidly, and loyal customers are spending less, not more, than new customers. Revenues were indeed growing rapidly, but only because Blue Apron’s marketing spend was growing even more rapidly. Marketing spend and CAC were particularly high in the twelve months prior to their IPO, creating the impression that they might have been trying to impress Wall Street with strong sales growth even if this meant acquiring many low or even negative CLV customers in the process. Our analyses suggested that Blue Apron was on a 'customer acquisition treadmill' that would be difficult to get off, because any pullback in marketing spending would cause sales to drop in tandem."

Finance

Chamath Palihapitiya says the problem with venture capital is its focus on short-term results: "You take a much broader step back, and you ask the question: "How is capitalism working today?" And I would say it's working a lot less well than it used to. And specifically what happens is there's a lot of hoarding of money. We celebrate a good friend of mine, Elon Musk, amazingly well. But what's tragic is there are so many other people that should also have been funded in the same way. Now what Elon was able to bring was his own capital, which was clearly exceedingly patient. And I can do the same thing. But what's unfortunate is both he and I still have to convince umpteen numbers of people that the things that we are collectively working on are worthwhile. The problem is that the people that control the money are not rewarded for making 15-year bets. They're rewarded for making year-long bets."

The founder of Hackers/Founders is introducing a fund that gives investors a way to seed startups while keeping their capital liquid: "The only way you make money investing in startups is if the company gets sold or there is an IPO. There’s a liquidity problem. There isn’t an easy way for an investor to sell their stock to someone else. So I am convinced that how we are doing this is broken. If you have a tech company in Peoria, no one is going to buy stock in your company, and it’s worse yet if you are in Buenos Aires, Bangladesh or Nigeria."

Startups

Here's how a Canadian startup turned the Instant Pot into a viral phenomenon: "I went to Kanata to get a peek behind the scenes of the Instant Pot phenomenon and meet its creator: Robert Wang, who invented the device and serves as chief executive of Double Insight, its parent company. What I found was a remarkable example of a new breed of 21st-century start-up — a homegrown hardware business with only around 50 employees that raised no venture capital funding, spent almost nothing on advertising, and achieved enormous size primarily through online word-of-mouth. It is also a testament to the enormous power of Amazon, and its ability to turn small businesses into major empires nearly overnight."

Big banks are pouring millions into a cyber-security startup: "Menlo, fittingly based in Menlo Park, Calif. (also home to Facebook), protects customers through an approach it calls 'web isolation,' whereby the company opens all emails, documents, attachments, and websites in a virtualized environment and then mirrors an image of the content back to end users. The approach differs from more frequently used sandboxing technology in that the “active” content, capable of running potentially malicious programs through a browser or stealing passwords, never has a chance, in theory, to touch an employee computer, even after it has been opened. 'The idea is if you never let anyone connect to outside content, you can stay clean,' says Menlo CEO and cofounder Amir Ben-Efraim."

Retail

The mall is dying in America's most middle-class city but not because its residents aren't shopping: "The mall is failing in the most middle-class city in America, and it isn’t because its 39,000 residents don’t shop. Shoppers here spend about 30% more than state and national averages, according to the Census Bureau. Sales-tax receipts have grown 20% in the county since 2011, and city officials say there isn’t one vacancy in Wausau’s downtown shopping district."

Communities are finding creative uses for dying malls: "After Hickory Hollow Mall in Antioch, Tenn., closed in 2011, it became the home of a new satellite campus of Nashville State Community College and a practice rink for Nashville’s professional hockey team. It still has stores, including an ethnic market filled with small immigrant businesses, but on a much smaller scale than before."

Online shirt startup Untuckit is opening brick-and-mortar stores much faster than Bonobos or Warby Parker did: "By the end of 2016, Untuckit had five stores and a ballooning business funded by its own profits, an impressive feat. This past April, it took its first dose of high-growth venture capital, raising $30 million from Kleiner Perkins at a reported $200 million valuation. Today, 80% of its business is online, and it has 25 stores, all of which are profitable, according to Riccobono. 'The metrics look so good right now that there’s just no reason to slow it down and not have our foot on the gas,' he says. So he’s planning to open another 25 next year."

RealReal has opened a brick-and-mortar store in New York City: "The huge success (the RealReal has raised $173 million since its founding) of various consignment sites feels opposed to the foundering retail business. There is Grailed, which focuses on street wear, and Heroine, a women’s wear counterpart, along with Vestiaire Collective and 1stdibs. They have consumed the middle market, taking customers for whom actual luxury pricing is too real … real. Shopping consignment is also a beautiful distraction. It is fashion Candy Crush; finding and scoring certain pieces can feel like a personal victory. Women I know who are familiar with the RealReal said they’ve started looking at it daily; the rest of the world is just too real … real. Founded in 2011 by Julie Wainwright, a dot-com boom-and-bust dynamo who began working in tech in the 1990s, most notably as chief executive of Pets.com (if you recall, its commercials featured a dog sock puppet whose personality was 'bro Lambchop'), the RealReal offers consignment with the promise of authentication by one of the company’s expert staff members."

Disruption

Uber is now disrupting ambulances: "Comparing ambulance volumes before and after Uber became available in each city, the two men found that the ambulance usage rate dipped significantly. Slusky said after using different methodologies to obtain the “most conservative” decline in ambulance usage, the researchers calculated the drop to be “at least” 7 percent. 'My guess is it will go up a little bit and stabilize at 10 to 15 percent as Uber continues to expand as an alternative for people,' Moskatel said. Slusky said he and Moskatel are submitting the paper to journals for peer review. San Francisco-based Uber quickly distanced itself from the notion that hailing an Uber driver is an acceptable substitute for calling an ambulance."

Ford has decided to locate its tech hub for self-driving and electric cars in Detroit: "By relocating the group from its corporate campus in nearby Dearborn, Ford is embracing its Motor City roots and creating an urban work environment similar to a Silicon Valley start-up. It is the latest in a series of strategic moves by Ford, the nation’s second-biggest automaker after General Motors, to accelerate its development of battery-powered vehicles and driverless technology. Ford has long been a major presence in southeastern Michigan with its headquarters and factories, but the company has had minimal operations in Detroit — where its founder, Henry Ford, built a Model T assembly plant more than a century ago."

The GOP Tax Plan

President Trump could save $11 million a year under the plan: "That estimate is based on the amount of money Trump earned in 2005, the most recent for which we have evidence of how his tax filings break down. The savings will come from earnings in pass-through entities—businesses that are not subject to corporate taxes but instead pass income to their owners, who pay individual rates. In 2005, Trump declared $67 million in income that appears to have come from pass-through companies, according to four tax experts who reviewed the filing on behalf of Forbes. In addition, he earned another $42 million categorized as business income, which may or may not have come from pass-through entities, experts said. Boil it down and it works like this: Trump should save about 10% of all business income that he can push into pass-through entities (surely most, if not all, of his day-to-day profits -- capital gains and any salary would be treated differently.)"

The plan will encourage employees to turn themselves into very small businesses: "The pass-through provision that House and Senate Republicans negotiated will allow anybody with pass-through income — with only the loosest restrictions — to take a 20 percent deduction on that income. Based on the language of the original Senate bill, which appears to be the model for the compromise, the authors propose that salaried employees will be able to transfigure into self-employed contractors or partnerships that will allow them to turn their wages into profits entitled to a deduction."

Trump's tax plan rewards companies for moving jobs overseas: To cut costs in a competitive global environment, Nelson Global executives in May announced the closure of the Clinton facility and a sister plant in Minnesota. Clinton’s 149 jobs and equipment were distributed among company facilities in North Carolina and Monterrey, Mexico, workers said, even as the president trumpeted his agenda of economic nationalism in Washington. 'He hollered that he was going to put a stop to that,' Johnson said. 'And he obviously did not.' Trump, in fact, might actually make things worse. What happened to the workers in Clinton, tax experts say, will probably happen to more Americans if the Republican tax overhaul becomes law. The legislation fails to eliminate long-standing incentives for companies to move overseas and, in some cases, may even increase them, they say."

Micheal Bloomberg calls the bill "a trillion-dollar blunder": "Corporations are sitting on arecordamount of cash reserves: nearly $2.3 trillion. That figure has been climbing steadily since the recession ended in 2009, and it's now double what it was in 2001. The reason CEOs aren't investing more of their liquid assets has little to do with the tax rate. CEOs aren't waiting on a tax cut to 'jump-start the economy' -- a favorite phrase of politicians who have never run a company -- or to hand out raises. It's pure fantasy to think that the tax bill will lead to significantly higher wages and growth, as Republicans have promised. Had Congress actually listened to executives, or economists who study these issues carefully, it might have realized that. Instead, Congress did what it always does: It put politics first. After spending the first nine months of the year trying to jam through a repeal of Obamacare without holding hearings, heeding independent analysis or seeking Democratic input, Republicans took the same approach to tax 'reform' -- and it shows."

The bill preserves incentives for wind and solar energy: "The last-minute changes, made as lawmakers reconciled the House and Senate versions of the tax legislation, reflect the growing political clout of the wind and solar industries, which now provide more than 7 percent of the nation’s electricity and are two of the fastest-growing energy sources. 'As wind and solar projects have soared in the U.S., in both red and blue states, so has the industry’s influence in Washington, D.C., on both sides of the aisle,' said Dan W. Reicher, director of the Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford."

The bill's biggest winner? Accountants: "As my own CPA father likes to say: Congress has once again taken pity upon the nation’s poor accountants and guaranteed them all lifetime employment. Tax-filing is already unbelievably resource-intensive. Every year, the nation collectively spends billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars on tax planning, compliance and preparation. At many companies, tax departments have effectively become profit centers, where armies of accountants and tax attorneys devise ways to legally shortchange Uncle Sam. With all due respect to my dad and his fellow “regulatory parasites” (his term, not mine), these are surely resources that could be more productively deployed elsewhere."

Human Resources

Sexual-harassment training doesn't work (but promoting women does): "Research has continually shown that companies with more women in management have less sexual harassment. It’s partly because harassment flourishes when men are in power and women aren’t, and men feel pressure to accept other men’s sexualized behavior. It also helps to reduce gender inequality in other ways, research shows, like paying and promoting men and women equally, and including both sexes on teams."

The National Labor Relations Board is giving franchisers a break: "Under the Obama-era doctrine, the fast-food corporation could be held liable for labor violations that occurred at the franchise even if the control it exerted was indirect — for example, if it required the franchisee to use software dictating certain scheduling practices — or if it had the right to exercise control over workers that it nonetheless didn’t exercise. The reversal could have important implications for the ability of workers to win concessions from employers through collective bargaining. In many cases, a contractor or franchisee has such low profit margins that it could not afford to raise wages or improve benefits even if it wanted to."

The exodus of foreign workers caused by Brexit is hurting British businesses: "During a one-night stopover in Birmingham, a city on the way to Mr. Mitchell’s farm in northern Scotland, the 30 Bulgarians were lured by a factory offering more attractive wages. They never made it to their original destination. The diversion of his work force meant that Mr. Mitchell, a fruit supplier for a major supermarket chain in Britain, lost 50 tons of fruit worth half a million pounds ($680,000) in a matter of weeks. Mr. Mitchell is not alone in his distress. Similar anecdotes have been reported by a wide range of employers, notably the National Health Service and the hospitality sector."

Net Neutrality

Here's how startups and small businesses will lose under the new rules: "Today, examples of online companies disrupting major industries abound. But FarmLogs is not your typical technology start-up, and its founders, Jesse Vollmar and Brad Koch, are not your typical Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurs. You won’t find FarmLogs’ headquarters in California, but instead in Michigan, a day-long drive from the Corn Belt. Nearly all of its customers are in the Midwest. Jesse Vollmar is a fifth-generation soy and corn farmer from Michigan. His partner, Brad Koch, similarly grew up surrounded by farms, and is only a few generations removed from farming himself. The pair started the company in their twenties. The success of this company is as much about agricultural process as about how the internet age has made entrepreneurship more accessible to all. Right now, anyone with an interest in launching a new venture has access to unprecedented online resources, relationships, and services. Good ideas and products can emerge from anywhere and almost instantly achieve national and even global reach. Crowdfunding platforms and social media have changed the way many small businesses get started raising capital. This stands in stark contrast to the state of entrepreneurship two decades ago, when starting a technology business often meant prohibitively heavy upfront investments, physical equipment, and limited access to broadband networks. It’s hard to imagine a time when it was easier for anyone to start a business. This trend — call it the “democratization of entrepreneurship”— depends on an open internet."